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MMC West Africa & North Africa 4Mi Snapshot – August 2022 Contact between smugglers and refugees and migrants in West and North Africa

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This snapshot focuses on how smugglers and refugees and migrants make contact in West and North Africa. It draws on 3,602 surveys of refugees and migrants who had used a smuggler or smugglers, conducted in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Libya and Tunisia from February 2021 to March 2022. It also draws on 356 smuggler surveys conducted in the same countries over June-October 2021. It provides analysis of the channels and the timing of contact between migrants and smugglers.

This snapshot is produced in partnership with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Observatory on Smuggling of Migrants.

Key findings

• Family and friends are the main channel through which migrants and refugees make contact with smugglers. This was the most frequently cited response by both refugees and migrants (42%) and smugglers (69%).

• Refugees and migrants more often indicated that they approached the smuggler directly (44%) than that the smuggler approached them (13%).

• Men reported approaching the smuggler more often than women (50% vs 34%).

• Cross-border contact between smugglers and refugees and migrants is particularly pronounced in Niger, where smugglers report contacting refugees and migrants mostly before their arrival in the country (67%).

• Respondents who left Niger, Chad, and Sudan – central locations on northbound migration routes – reported that contact with smugglers was facilitated by family and friends less frequently than respondents who departed from other West and Central African countries, perhaps because this central location means that people can access smugglers directly more easily, and have less need of an intermediary